Re: Good read from a new GNOME user

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

Thanks Britt for starting this discussion, and thanks to Carmen for
the useful summary. I don't agree with every point raised, but there
are a lot of valid ones.

I'll provide some brief comments from a design perspective. Obviously
there are a lot of issues here: individual discussions should probably
happen elsewhere.

Carmen Bianca Bakker <carmen carmenbianca eu> wrote:
...
> 1. The desktop does nothing. There is no functionality other than on
> the top bar. ...

This is a long-known issue that was discussed around the time of the
original GNOME 3 designs, and is currently being discussed again by
the design team [1]. It's a tricky issue that's the result of some of
the core GNOME 3 design choices.

...
> 2b. No battery percentage on status bar.

I'd be interested in showing the percentage when the status menu is
open [2], but having an option to permanently show it seems fine too
[3].

> 2c. No app indicators.

Yes, I think we need to return to that discussion.

> 2d. No suspend button.

I agree we can improve this, and I did some design work for it a
little while ago [4].

> 3a. It is difficult to reach the app drawer.

I've explored this previously; it's a bit tricky and depends on some
other more fundamental questions (do we have dock, what do we show in
the top bar, etc).

> 3b. Application names are cut off.

This is a long-standing issue which I believe has a design agreed. We
just need to land the MR [5].

> 3c. Folders in the app drawer aren't customisable.

We've been wanting to have Endless's drag and drop app folders
upstreamed for some time now: we're just waiting for it to happen.

> 4. Unnecessary notifications (e.g., "Application is ready")

Indeed, my feeling is that those notifications do more harm than good.
I can't see an issue for this; does anyone know of one?

...
> 5b. Icons in Nautilus are confusing.

That doesn't look like GNOME's icon theme - it would be clearer if it
was. My understanding is that the lack of tooltips is a technical
limitation of popover menus.

On a related topic: the design team is currently evaluating these
buttons in menus, and are waiting on the menus to be updated in order
to do some usability testing [6].

> 5d. The file picker isn't very good.

I did a review of our file picker a little while ago [7] and it
generally looked OK to me. The main issue seems to be the lack of icon
view, which I agree would be good to have, and have included in my
latest experimental mockups.

...
> 8b. Difficult to set custom wallpaper.

The latest designs [8] have a button to select a file. However, I
think we'd like to revisit these designs before anything gets
implemented, and they've been stuck in our design backlog for a little
while.

A concluding remark: quite a few of these issues relate to the shell,
and on the design side we've wanted to make improvements in that area
for a long time, but have been held back due to a lack of developer
resources. It would be amazing if we had more developers working in
that area, to help us resolve these prominent issues.

Allan
-- 
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/1216
[2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/1241
[3] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/issues/481
[4] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/270
[5] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/merge_requests/109
[6] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk-support-for-gnome-design-patterns/551/20?u=allanday
[7] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/FileSelection#Tentative_Design
[8] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Background#Tentative_Design